Carriage return
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

how we used to do it

Broadband celebrates it’s tenth birthday! It is hard to believe that a decade has passed since we were running businesses and buying on-line via those toe-curlingly slow whistling, humming, clicking 56kb dial-up modems. And yet in the day we were so impressed! A few years earlier I’d brought a fax machine that had the impressive go faster stripe on the side saying ‘all data transmitted at ultra-fast 9600bauds a minute (that is 9.6kb). A page of A4 text every 40 seconds – zipperty do da. We really thought we were cooking on gas. Despite Steve Job’s best efforts, people still hanker for technology that feels comfortable – hence the delightfully retro ‘dialler’ app for the iPhone. No doubt someone is designing a typewriter iPhone app with full carriage return so that we can send text messages the old fashioned way.